Dear editor: I am writing in response to Fred Camper’s article entitled “The Banality of Badness” [January 21]. Although I respect Mr. Camper’s right to his own opinion I have a problem with his inaccuracy of statement. Most importantly, Mr. Camper’s statement regarding the collaboration between Judy Chicago and weaver Audrey Cowan on The Fall tapestry. Mr. Camper states, “This enormous tapestry was recently completed by an unpaid weaver who worked long hours for years, following Chicago’s design....

The Taming of the Shrew at Footsteps Theatre Company Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In her program notes to this Footsteps Theatre production director Jean Adamak acknowledges the play’s difficulty: “Choosing…The Taming of the Shrew may seem odd for a women’s theatre company.” Indeed, today Shakespeare’s comedy about the courting and marriage of two very different sisters doesn’t seem terribly funny. But Adamak and the Footsteps cast and crew have restored my love for Kate in this, their fifth all-female Shakespeare production, opening my eyes to a much deeper reading of a finely crafted comedy....

“You see me as a sweet back-loaded puppet / And you’ve got a meal-ticket taste.” With those artless words, Alanis Morissette nicely captures the story behind the all-too-temporary fame she’s now experiencing. Alternative rock’s latest one-hit wonder, a 20-year-old Canadian poseur, is riding on the swell of her vulgar piece of soft-porn attitudinizing, “You Oughtta Know.” The accompanying album–one-hit wonders always insist on putting out albums–is a riot of unoriginality. The starter is “All I Really Want,” a heavily programmed rave-up full of low-budget Bono- and Edge-isms....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I hope you paid Erin Hogan well for her brave article (“Jerked Around,” October 27), since that seems to be the only compensation she will get for her diligent pursuit of justice. She deserves credit for her persistence, and especially for taking the time to write her story. I would like her to know that her efforts mean a lot to me as a woman who, like many women I know, has been the unwilling target of various sexual “misdemeanors....

AUGUST With their show The Female Gaze, organizers at Woman Made Gallery are trying to take the nude out of the realm of “the male gaze.” The show features male and female nudes by 15 artists from ten states working in everything from wood to multimedia. It opens tonight with a free reception from 7 to 10 at the gallery, 4646 N. Rockwell. The show runs through August 30. Call 588-4317 for more....

AACM 30th Anniversary Festival Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The opening performance by the organization’s most renowned group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was largely a disappointment. Its main strength and main weakness can be summed up the same way: everyone sounded terrific individually. Saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell offered a stunning display of extended sounds through circular breathing, and bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut consistently played with drive....

“The images were most horrendous,” says actress Lauren Tom, her voice rising indignantly on the phone. “They made me really angry. I wanted to gag.” Tom, who’s best known for her role as Lena in The Joy Luck Club, has just watched a short documentary by Valerie Soe titled Picturing Oriental Girls, which catalogs some of the most ignorant and offensive portrayals of Asian American women in Hollywood cinema. This Friday Tom will comment on the video at a benefit for the Asian American Institute, a local think tank and watchdog group....

I wonder why Joan Armatrading has never titled one of her albums Smoke and Mirrors. That phrase neatly captures the specifics of what she does: she uses the billowing smoke of her voice to convey her often remarkable songs, which so accurately mirror a wide range of emotional states. But it also describes the shifty magic she wields, creating powerful statements from deceptive wisps of melody and verbiage. (Credit her songwriter’s instincts: from the time she gravitated to music, as a British teenager of Caribbean heritage, Armatrading has thought of herself first and foremost as a composer....

Any appearance by saxophonist Joe Lovano promises excitement and power; this one offers as an added fillip the U.S. nightclub premiere of his spectacular new band. At its center sits Billy Hart, one of the most imaginative and sensitive drummers of jazz’s last two decades: going back to Herbie Hancock’s early-70s electric combo, Hart has been spicing his accompaniment with ideas as modern as science, all the while plugged into a pulse older than jazz....

Lead Story On a sanctuary island off the coast of Mauritius, England’s Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust runs breeding programs for seriously endangered species, including the extremely rare Mauritius kestrel falcon and the equally rare Mauritius pink pigeon. In October the trust announced that one of the falcons had swooped down and eaten one of the pigeons. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Animal inheritances: In January Anna Morgan of Seattle left an estate valued at $500,000 to Tinker, her 11-year-old Turkish Angora cat; Morgan’s apartment will be maintained and a live-in caretaker hired for Tinker....

Ghana carpenter Kane Quaye added a new dimension to his village’s funeral tradition when he built a playful, artfully decorated coffin in the shape of a canoe for his dying uncle, who had been a fisherman. The coffin made such a splash in the village–where the dead are bid farewell in the Ghanaian tradition of lavish funeral processions of music and dancing–that others began placing orders. That was more than 30 years ago....

“It’s storybook romantic,” says Keith Uchima, describing his Jade Monkey King, a three-act musical adaptation of the colorful Chinese folk myth Monkey. The hero is a supernatural creature who’s chosen by Buddha to accompany a monk making a pilgrimage to India. “They are joined by a pig and a martial-artist monk, and their adventures and fights against villains call for music, dance, and all sorts of pageantry.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Like many movements that started out on grassroots power, conservation has become big business. Virtually every branch of government has its own officials charged with looking after the health of plants, animals, and entire ecosystems. Nonprofit groups with conservation missions flourish. Universities have devoted increased attention to departments focusing on environmental studies, environmental ethics, and the relations of humans to their surroundings. In 1984 Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson attempted to explain human interest in conservation with Biophilia, a slender volume in which he defined the term he’d coined for his title as “the innate [human] tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes ....

George Romero had him write the story and musical score for Dawn of the Dead. John Carpenter and Brian De Palma have acknowledged borrowing his cinematic methods–having the camera take the point of view of the stalker, for instance, or creating tension through the use of claustrophobic settings. Who is he? Italian director Dario Argento, whose style-over-substance horror films–two of which are showing at the Film Center this weekend–quietly earned him a cult following back in the 70s....

Shake Shake Shake, Shake Shake Shake, Shake Your Ass, Annoyance Theatre. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Now, 15 years later, the 70s don’t look so bad. Sure, the clothes were weird and the hairstyles were for shit and Carter was more disappointing than Clinton, but we were all so young and thin and in love. Could it be that it was all so simple then?...

FIREWORKS 4/7, EMPTY BOTTLE Judging from their exceedingly raunchy debut, Set the World on Fire (Crypt), these pure trash rock ‘n’ rollers from Dallas like their music stripped to the bone, loud, and boozed-up–like their musical and spiritual brethren the Gibson Brothers and the Gories. In the one-dimensional obsessiveness of their mumbled tributes to a bygone world of fast cars and loose women lies the band’s absurd appeal. They open for Laughing Hyenas, Steel Pole Bath Tub, and Love 666....

As far as I know this is something of a first, at least since the 20s or 30s: a movie predicated on film theory playing in a commercial theater. Written, directed, and produced by American independents Scott McGehee and David Siegel, this odd black-and-white ‘Scope thriller (1993) about identity and social construction concerns a young man named Clay who becomes briefly acquainted with his half-brother Vincent. Vincent, who wants to flee the country for various reasons, secretly arranges to have Clay blown up in Vincent’s car wearing Vincent’s clothes; with everyone believing he’s dead, Vincent can easily disappear....

The ascension of Newt Gingrich to speaker of the House is surely the political atrocity of the year–if not the decade. Imagine, however, the competition for this honor had the folks in Virginia given us Senator Oliver North, or Californians thrust Senators Michael and Arianna Huffington upon us! All we could hurl at our fellow Americans was Congressman Michael Patrick Flanagan. Reynolds Rap: Mel Reynolds, the distinguished gentleman from the Second District of Chicago, gave us a doubleheader....

Nice work if you can get it. “Madonna is a hot item, extremely popular among cutting-edge academics right now,” says U. of I. comparative-literature graduate student Hartmut Heep, who presented a paper, “Madonna: The Politics of Sex,” to the April meeting of the American Popular Culture Conference. Heep’s Rhetoric 105 undergraduates at first “read Madonna very uncritically. They didn’t listen to the lyrics or interpret the texts or her stage performances at all....

Shaggy Since reggae artist Shabba Ranks’s mainstream success three years ago, dancehall has been searching for its next ambassador. At first, fans had pinned their hopes on Buju Banton and Terror Fabulous. But Banton has pushed aside crossover dreams and firmly ensconced himself in Rastafarian culture, aiming his latest album, Til Shiloh, specifically at Jamaican reggae fans. And Fabulous hasn’t been seen on pop charts since last year’s hit, “Action.”...